Malcolm Muggeridge

Who was Malcolm Muggeridge?

Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge was an English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist. During World War II, he was a soldier and a spy. As a young man, Muggeridge was a left-wing sympathiser but he later became a forceful anti-communist. He is credited with popularising Mother Teresa and Catholic theology, and in his later years became a religious and moral campaigner.

Famous Quotes:

• In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.
• Civilization -- a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.
• The pursuit of happiness, which American citizens are obliged to undertake, tends to involve them in trying to perpetuate the moods, tastes and aptitudes of youth.
• This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life.
• One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.
• Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.
• Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.
• The trouble with kingdoms of heaven on earth is that they're liable to come to pass, and then their fraudulence is apparent for all to see. We need a kingdom of heaven in Heaven, if only because it can't be realized.
• St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.
• There's nothing is this world more instinctively abhorrent to me than finding myself in agreement with my fellow-humans.